Doctoral Dissertation Research: Assessing anthropogenic impacts on endangered primates

由于栖息地的丧失和人类活动的增加，世界各地的各种物种都濒临灭绝。需要进行研究，超越目前对保护区的关注，转向其他人类修改的景观，以确定野生动物和人类如何共存。这个博士论文项目结合了一种生活在与人类共享的景观中的濒危狐猴物种的行为、生态学、人口统计学和遗传学数据，以评估人类活动对该物种的影响。除了进一步了解人类-狐猴的动态，该项目还将为野生生物学家和保护区的管理人员提供一个模型，以更全面地研究人类-野生动物的动态。作为该项目的一部分，研究人员将对学生进行野外和实验室技术方面的培训，包括行为数据收集、野生动物调查以及DNA提取和扩增。此外，该项目将为公共科学推广、国际研究合作和灵长类动物保护做出贡献。研究人员将对人类活动对Verreaux‘s sifaka生态的影响进行精细分析，包括这种狐猴物种如何应对干扰，以及哪些类型的人类活动最具威胁性。将收集生活在受不同程度人类干扰地区的西法卡的行为、人口统计和地理数据。这些调查将集中在贝萨·马哈法利特别保护区，这是马达加斯加西南部最近扩大的保护区，包括核心保护区和受管制的人类使用区。在更大的景观尺度上，调查人员将调查贝萨地区未受保护的森林碎片，并使用粪便DNA进行景观遗传分析。这些分析将确定西法卡如何在人类主导的地貌中移动，以及西法卡种群的结构如何受到人类土地利用模式的影响。最后，调查人员将结合贝萨西法卡核心种群的长期人口数据和西法卡进出保护区的数据，预测该种群未来的增长和稳定。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Diverse species worldwide are endangered because of habitat loss and increased exposure to human activities. Research is needed that moves beyond the current focus on protected areas to other human-modified landscapes to determine how wildlife and humans can coexist. This doctoral dissertation project combines behavioral, ecological, demographic, and genetic data from an endangered lemur species that lives in a landscape shared with humans, to assess how this species is affected by human activities. In addition to furthering knowledge about human-lemur dynamics, the project will provide a model for wildlife biologists and managers of protected areas to investigate human-wildlife dynamics more generally. As part of this project, investigators will train students in field and laboratory techniques, including behavioral data collection, wildlife surveys, and DNA extraction and amplification. Further, the project will contribute to public science outreach, international research collaborations, and primate conservation. The investigators will conduct a fine-scale analysis of the impacts of human activities on the ecology of the Verreaux's sifaka, including how this lemur species responds to disturbances and which types of human activities are most threatening. Behavioral, demographic, and geographic data will be collected for sifakas living in areas subject to differing degrees of human disturbance. These investigations will be focused at Bezà Mahafaly Special Reserve, a recently expanded protected area in southwest Madagascar that includes core conservation areas as well as areas of regulated human use. At a larger landscape scale, investigators will survey unprotected forest fragments in the Bezà region and conduct landscape genetic analyses, using fecal DNA. These analyses will determine how sifakas move across the human-dominated landscape and how the structure of the sifaka population is influenced by patterns of human land use. Finally, investigators will combine long-term demographic data from the core sifaka population at Bezà with data on sifaka movement into and out of the reserve to predict the population's future growth and stability.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.